When you do , you’ll get a short book called Four Questions to Change Your Life!

After you read it you will know whether you want more from me or not. Pretty simple.

I’m not going to sell you anything. You will either want this material or you don’t need it.

If you do need it, I’m happy to provide it. I believe I can help.

If you don’t need it, I’m happy you don’t!

THINK YOU’RE NOT SMART?

You may think you aren’t smart but if so, you haven’t been tested properly.

There’s no point testing you for geography if your gift is in art.

Or, deciding you can’t “do” math if you never learned properly.

Or, saying you’re not smart in English if your talents lie in science.

Is this ringing any bells?

I’ll explain how things got screwed up and how they can get unscrewed.

Your gifts may not ever have been recognized and so you got labelled “not smart enough” and you got shunted off to the side rail of the success track.

Let’s find out if that’s true and if so, how we can fix it.

PART ONE 1. The old way of deciding ‘Smart’ and the new way.

Why the new way leads to Self-Knowledge and more success on your own terms.

THE OLD WAY OF SEEING HOW SMART WE WERE

In the old days (most of the 20th century) the ways in which people decided how smart we were consisted almost exclusively of measuring I.Q. (intelligence quotient) on two main scales: the Wechsler-Bellevue and the Stanford-Binet. Both measured I.Q. primarily through language and logical-mathematical ability.

What if they weren’t your strengths? You got shifted to the non-academic class. Nothing wrong with that except they made the academic decisions, your academic future, far too early based on insufficient information.

Worse, they didn’t consider craftsmanship a talent anyway—they just said, ‘Oh, he’s good with his hands, let’s put him in woodworking or mechanics.’ They didn’t consider that a good thing, it was a fallback position. Trade school not college was the watchword for decades.

Different kinds of smart

Had they considered being a craftsman or artesian talents to be celebrated and developed in the 40s, 50s, and to a degree, the 60s, there would have been no problem. Talents are talents in whichever sphere. But that’s not the way talent was looked at then.

In any case, wouldn’t you have liked to know what your talents were instead of being put into classes as default positions.

DID THAT HAPPEN TO YOU?

Was that a good plan in your case or not?

Unless you had observant and enc0uraging parents, or somehow you got the insight to know yourself early in life and the guts to dismiss what others said and follow y0ur path, (slim chance of that happening!) you got put in the wrong stream for your life’s work.

The question now is, is it too late to get on track?

No one wants to wake up at 50 and realize, ‘Hey, I should have been an X or have done Y, or have gone on to study Z.

THE NEW WAY OF JUDGING SMART: multiple intelligences

According to Harvard psychologist Howard Gardner, there are (at least) ten kinds off smart. We aren’t restricted to the old (linguist or mathematical) any longer (not that they aren’t important!) Multiple Intelligences is the theory (now accepted generally as fact) written about by Harvard psychologist Howard Gardner in his books. I’ll give you more on him in Resources at the end of the next article.

YOUR GIFTS, TALENTS AND ABILITIES

Your gifts, attributes, talents and some abilities are present in early childhood. They may not have been recognized, but they were evident to observant people.

If your gifts have been unrecognized, they are not dead, they’re dormant but you have to identify them before you can use them. Talents are like muscles; they atrophy if they are not used.

Whether they develop or not is a function of the family, society, education and training that allows you to develop skills and abilities in the areas of your gifts. Many parents, for whatever reason, simply don’t have the capacity see the great individual possibilities in their children. And all children have great possibilities.

Do you feel you have lost out somehow, that you missed your calling, that because of circumstances the work you do, the life you lead, is not what you dreamed of or wanted for yourself?

Or was it worse, that you did not know what you wanted to do in life, you didn’t have dream, because you didn’t know what your talents were or how to employ them. You didn’t even know that whatever talents you had could even be used to create a dream.

WHAT WE KNOW, WHAT WE DON’T KNOW, AND WHAT WE DON’T KNOW WE DON’T KNOW!

Smart? Yes you are.

There are things we know and things we don’t know.

But there are also things we don’t know that we don’t know.

If we don’t know something but we know we need to know it, we can find out. We can Google it if it’s simple, or learn it from a friend, or take a course on it or even go to college or training school and become an apprentice to master it.

But if we do not even know that we don’t know something we’re beaten before we start.

You go to a new city but if you didn’t use Google you won’t know where to find the place where your favorite kind of music is. It might be around the corner from your hotel but it might as well be in Korea, because you are not gonna find it.

DEVELOPING YOUR TALENTS

It’s the same with developing your talents.

You have to know you have them before you can develop them.

What if you like the flute but never take lessons? (Do you know how many people took music lessons but dropped them too fast and now, in their 20s and 30s, they wish they had pursued a career in music? That’s just an example. Substitute your own situation.)

The inherent ability to play the guitar is there, maybe, but you have to study the instrument and practice it, in order to develop that talent. It doesn’t just come with breathing!

So the education system preferred us to be good at math and language and not the tactile arts.

But only to a point. Most people did not graduate from high school and of those who did, few did not go on to further education. Students were expected to get a decent enough education and then go to work in factories or fields. The development of talent that was not considered the norm was discouraged. Diverse qualitied that could have been looked upon as talent, was ignored.

So that was a problem.

But it was worse.

CREATIVITY

The concept of creativity also got confused in people’s minds in earlier generations. We failed to recognize it because it appeared to be outside the arts. Most people didn’t recognize creativity other fields, such as business.

So, in the 21st century, how do you catch up?

How to you rectify this?

How do you change it?

How do you get to know how you are smart and in what ways now that you’re older? (If you’re reading this and you are young, say, under 45, that’s a bonus.)

And once know how smart you are and how you are smart, in what ways, in which areas, then what?

Can you have a better life?

What can you do about it?

For everyone, young or old, is it too late?

Not if you get to know yourself.

KNOW YOURSELF

I’m not going to kid you. Knowing yourself well is a life-long journey but once you start you can see dramatic results fast and it will be exciting (we’re talking about you here!). You can learn how smart you are and in what special ways pretty fast. It takes work but the work is exciting because it is all about you.

Then by both design (I’ll teach you how) and work (yes it takes some work) it becomes easier and easier to learn about yourself and your gifts.

And suddenly, the knowledge, the information, the results, come faster and faster. After you do some basic work, you learn by osmosis, you learn every day just by living. You become attuned to the process, you do it WHILE you are living, day to day. It just becomes part of you.

Remember, we said those ways in which you are smart, were dormant—they’re not dead! (And you’re not dead!) Your memories and desires will come rushing to the surface and you have to do is listen to your inner voice, learn about yourself and your relationship with the world; and act on it.

I’ll help you do it.

You’ll see results fast.

Just in this four-part series.

Probably in this first one!

The first day!

I assure you.

She’s smart. OK, beautiful, but smart too!

Have I Caught your attention?

I hope so.

Next: How do you know how smart you are and how you are smart?

Soon, you will receive part 2 in this transformative 4-part series, Ten Kinds of Smart.

It’s called Multiple Intelligences. How do you know how smart you are and how you are smart?